Couple Trouble

“Blue Valentine,” “Rabbit Hole,” and “How Do You Know.”

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in a love story for grownups.Credit Illustration by PHILIP BURKE

The first thing we see in “Blue Valentine” is a small girl, standing alone in the grass, crying out a name. It’s a simple sight, yet fraught with alarming possibility, and that goes for the rest of the movie. Here is the tale of a man and a woman falling in and out of love: something that happens every day, to millions of people, as if that were any consolation. “ ’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all,” Tennyson wrote, and instinct tells us to agree. But he was writing of bereavement—of a love cut off in its glory, through nobody’s fault. What if the love wizens and sours, through everyone’s fault, making the loss too bitter to endure? Who wouldn’t wonder, in a low moment, whether the whole damn thing was worth it, after all?

The girl is Frankie (Faith Wladyka), aged about five, the only child of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams). Frankie is calling for their dog, which has run off, and Cindy’s search for the wanderer strikes the first note of desperation in the film, though hardly the last. When she arrives late for a school concert, her eyes are wet; the news is not good, and you want to know how Dean will break it to their daughter. “Maybe she moved out to Hollywood and became a movie dog,” he says to her, which is as good a working metaphor for death as I have heard. It’s also a hint of how closely Dean is tuned to Frankie—more closely, sometimes, than her mother is. Together, father and daughter lick the raisins from her oatmeal off the kitchen table (“We’re eating like leopards,” he explains), which shows what a kid he is himself, and what sort of laceration would result if they were parted.

As if in response to this worry, the movie then parts company with itself. One moment, we’re watching Frankie being dropped off with Cindy’s father (John Doman) for a sleepover. The next, we see Dean, looking spry and chipper, applying for a job with a firm of house movers. What’s happening? It takes a while to realize that this is a flashback, to the period before he and Cindy met—the era in which, like all lovers, they feel in retrospect that they were arrowing toward each other. But notice what Derek Cianfrance, the director and co-writer, does not do. He supplies no title saying “Five years earlier,” or whatever, and arranges no major shift in tone, aside from a slight cranking up of the colors. In other words, the past is not so different from the present, and what should be horribly confusing about “Blue Valentine” becomes its most rending aspect; namely, that as we swipe backward and forward through the rest of the film, we can’t always tell the now from the then. Given that one means rage, silence, and failed sex and the other meant a flurry of eagerness and lust, you would imagine the gulf to be unbridgeable; but it doesn’t look that way, and the bridging is the saddest thing of all.

Nothing out of the ordinary happens in “Blue Valentine,” and that, together with the vital, untrammelled performances of the two leading actors, is the root of its power. Dean and Cindy try to mend their marriage by taking a short, child-free, romantic break—a sure sign that the damage is now beyond repair. They go to a motel with a choice of fancy suites: Cupid’s Cove or the Future Room. They pick the latter, which, with its revolving bed and planetary décor, is a tacky, dated vision of a future that will never be. “Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars,” Bette Davis said at the end of “Now, Voyager”; but she was eons away from the cratered desolation of these two, and she didn’t have a guy with smoke on his breath, arms covered in tattoos, and a head full of vodka trying to muscle her into submission on the floor. Not that the past was a paradise; when Cindy runs into an old boyfriend (Mike Vogel), we are spirited further back to the time when she got pregnant by him, with harrowing results. If you want to see an entire abortion debate dramatized in a few minutes, every angle is represented here, from the brutishness of the conception to the delicate courtesy of the doctor and the sudden, terrified realization of the woman that she cannot and must not withdraw her child from existence.

All of this demonstrates that “Blue Valentine” is that rare creation: a love story that doesn’t shy away from sex, ignore its consequences, or droop into pointless fantasy. The result is adult entertainment as it should be, in other words, right down to the laugh that Cindy lets out, in her leaping delight, when Dean goes down on her. Needless to say, the M.P.A.A., which cannot bear very much reality, took fright at all this and hobbled the movie with an NC-17 rating, which was overturned only after a concerted challenge. It is now an R-rated picture, and rightly so, although you have to ask: In what circumstances would you take a teen-ager, let alone a child, to see it? Who, on the verge of growing up, would wish to learn that the first heady bloom of rapture is doomed to rot and fall, and that even someone as devoted as Dean will wind up pleading to his paramour, with a kind of bullish grovel, “Tell me how I should be”?

And yet we have the ukulele—a dumb little strummer that Dean holds high on his chest as he serenades his twin soul. This is long ago, in the springtime of their relationship, but the night is dark and chilly, and Cindy, in a sloppy red sweater, dances in the doorway of a shop, with a garlanded heart hanging behind her. “I have to sing goofy in order to sing,” Dean says, and then he starts: “You always hurt / The ones you love / The one you shouldn’t hurt at all.” His voice, as promised, is a strangulated tenor, like Roy Orbison with a bad cold, and her dancing is no prettier. But somehow, from this silliness, Cianfrance strikes a deep chord of longing, and the sequence slips into place beside other foolish, trifling moments that last forever, like Audrey Hepburn giving us “Moon River,” in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and noodling away on her guitar. The director clearly knows what he has here; the tune is repeated over the closing credits, and the film’s first trailer was composed of little else. We can forgive him such excess, I think, because his whole story dances to the tune and the pain of the song. “Blue Valentine,” true to its title, is overwhelming proof that hurt is the bedfellow of love. For anybody who already knows that, or has been the cause of it, the film may be very hard to take. I saw it months ago, and I can’t forget it, but I’m not sure that I’ll be seeing it again.

Just to ramp up the festivity, “Rabbit Hole” introduces another couple trying to claw their way out of despair. In “Blue Valentine,” we never actually saw the hinge—the instant, or the indefinable period, at which the lovers’ lives swivelled from a pleasure to a grind. They probably didn’t notice it themselves. For Howie (Aaron Eckhart) and Becca (Nicole Kidman), the husband and wife in “Rabbit Hole,” there is no such mystery; everything broke when their four-year-old son was killed. We meet them not in the midst of the horror but in its frozen aftermath, eight months later, and the smartest thing about the script—adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire from his own play—is the patient, difficult drip of information. Not for a while can we work out exactly how the child died, or even what his name was. It’s as though the world around the survivors, with its flow of helpful conversation, had seized up altogether.

Against all expectations, you approach “Rabbit Hole” with a heavy heart and leave with a lighter one. This is not because the director, John Cameron Mitchell, reaches for some sappy, smiling-through-tears brand of closure but precisely because he refuses to tread the path laid out by dozens of TV movies on a similar theme. I feared the worst, as the opening sequence showed Becca bedding a tiny plant in her herbaceous border, only to have it trampled on and snapped by a clumsy neighbor. Emotional symbol alert! New life in peril! From then on, however, more subtle tensions come into play, with scenes that could have been merely morose swerving into unhappy slapstick: Becca nearly spun off her feet by a revolving door, or slapping another mother, in the supermarket, for not treating her kid to some candy. Over the years, Kidman’s watchful self-calibration as a performer has grown so controlled that she often skitters toward mannerism, but her role here is a good fit, because Becca is herself defined by a brittle (and finally fruitless) urge to control—to tamp down an eruptive grief. Better still, Kidman is paired with Dianne Wiest, who plays Nat, Becca’s mother, and who has yet to enter a movie without donating her warmth and her cracked sweetness. The sight of Nat getting tipsy, in a bowling alley, is at once endearing and awful, because it makes you wonder about the sorrows that she, too, has been required to drown.

Does Mitchell’s movie ever fly, with the furious velocity of “Blue Valentine”? Not quite. It’s hard to fault the ensemble work in “Rabbit Hole,” but the film bears lingering traces of its grounding onstage, whereas Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling simply climb into their characters and take off—I, for one, was far too consumed by their dramatic destination to stop and assess how great the acting was. One glance at the cast list of “How Do You Know,” the new James L. Brooks comedy, and you might well be hoping for something similar. The film boasts Reese Witherspoon as a national softball player at the dusk of her career, Owen Wilson as a baseball pro with busy loins, Paul Rudd as a klutz, and Jack Nicholson as his expansive father. Everything looks primed for civilized amusement, but somewhere along the way the laughs dropped off, together with the question mark in the title.

The cinematographer is Janusz Kaminski, whose appointed task is to creep in close to Reese Witherspoon, the better to gloat over her caramel tan and the azure shine of her eyes. (When she played opposite Paul Newman, in “Twilight,” twelve years ago, it was like an intergenerational blue-off.) She also has to wear twirling, girly dresses in red, white, and blue, as if planning to downsize from softball to cheerleading. All of this has an infantilizing effect, which seems cruel for a character who is thirty-one—although, to be fair, nobody in the film, not even Nicholson, behaves as a grownup should. People keep gulping their lines, snatching up their cell phones like high-school gabblers, and trotting in and out of rooms to announce a change of mind. They swim into one another’s ken and then veer off again, into the solo arc of their itchy ditherings, pausing only to pass weird, superfluous judgment on what has occurred. “Good phone call!” says one. “Nice visit!” says another. Bad movie! ♦